


Don't cry because it's over

by Spylace



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Bullying, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Mindfuck, chuck gives me a lot of feels okay?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 23:12:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of a boy who fell in love with himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't cry because it's over

**Author's Note:**

> There was a prompt on Pacific Rim Kink Meme (of course there was) where Raleigh fell into a coma after Knifehead and somehow bb!Chuck got a hold of him and charged premium for shared headspace. 
> 
> Anyway, to make the long story short, this is not that story.

Chuck is young, he is stupid. He gets picked on sometimes and it’s hard not to react. It’s like poking a hornet’s nest and expecting it not to explode. By fifteen, he has been in more fistfights than any of his classmates combined, punching his way to a superior’s desk and receiving demerits as easily as he does grades.

His instructors always have half an eye out for the scrubby ginger kid but it’s not enough. He’s the best of class but it doesn’t warrant special treatment. His body has yet to catch up to his inflated ego and attitude. He starts avoiding people, pushes them away like Moses the Red Sea, and soon people learn to ignore him.

Only Mori continues to greet him in the hallways and he can’t figure out if it’s because she’s polite or just wants him in bed.

But it’s been a long time since he thought of himself in terms of likeability. The word seems petty and obsolete in the face of the monsters at their door. If the kaiju have taught him anything, it is this—he doesn’t need other people.

 

Chuck and his classmates graduate within the month. As a reward, their instructors send them to Oblivion Bay for one last sobering mission. But contrary to all expectations, the jaeger graveyard is replete with tourists. It is where rich people come to gawp at their fallen idols, buy souvenirs for their rich friends waiting back home.

A little girl in a smart wool cap and matching pair of boots rush past him like she’s on a carnival ride, her laughter tinkling in his ears and making his teeth clench. She chirps at Matador Fury, Romeo Blue and Horizon Brave as she might greet goats at a petting zoo. Mercifully, she stops in front of Gipsy Danger whom she does not recognize. The guide steps in and begins to speak.

Gipsy Danger is beautiful. She looks how a jaeger should look despite missing half her face and beaten to scrap. The guide yammers on about how she’s state-of-the-art. She scored three kills before Knifehead got her. Ranger Becket piloted her alone for fifteen minutes before beaching her like a drowned whale. His lips curl when he remembers that the coward ran after and never came back.

As they round her body, he sees that she’s been laid open like a gutted fish and it is obscene. Her pons system is hanging out like laundry or someone’s underthings and Chuck turns his head to spare the jaeger’s dignity.

Before, before, before, Gipsy used to be his favorite. The Beckets used to be great. He stares down at his feet in embarrassment and his classmates elbow him in the ribs, push him around because it’s easy. They think that he’s a sook but it’s not that. It’s called respect. He’s just being respectful.  

The others don’t see it that way and as soon as their guide’s back is turned, they string him up in the harness like a marionette. He flails and yells but his voice doesn’t carry far. It’s the first thing he noticed about Oblivion Bay, how quiet everything is like footsteps across wet sand.

 _Look at him_ —they laugh as they admire their handiwork.

He is terrified. Micah and his cronies might have let him go if he’d begged but he doesn’t so they don’t. They want to kill him; it’s what they’ve been taught.

Chuck swings back and forth, suspended like the hanged man. His eyes water slightly and the other boys soon grow bored.

One of them, Zeroni, brightens when he sees the tangle of wires dangling from the ceiling. Chuck thrashes as he is plugged in, taking no small amount of satisfaction when Micah comes up bloody-nosed and hurting.

The harness cuts into his flesh. He knows he should be wearing a circuit suit to disperse the relays but he is not. Chuck feels as though this might be what it’s like to drown. He is like a witch dumped inside a well. If he floats, he will be struck down. If he sinks, he is dead anyway.

It’s like Christmas inside his head with all lights turned on. Synapses fire, misfire, as nerve endings curl black from inside out.

He screams.

At the very last minute, someone grabs him from behind and hauls him to safety.

The rest is silence.

 

When he wakes up, it is to a stranger’s voice.

There is a steady pressure at the base of his skull that is neither hot nor cold. It feels like someone’s placed their thumb there and forgot, just there like the clench of his fists in the over-starched hospital sheets or the underlying taint of antiseptic permeating the air. Chuck wiggles a little, trying to dislodge the stranger tucked against his back.

He wakes up and he is alone.

“Chuck?”

Wrong—he thinks and he feels a pang of shame at the bags under the old man’s eyes, the way he hasn’t shaven in a couple of days for his scruff to be that thick. Uncle Scott’s nowhere nearby. Chuck blinks slowly, his eyes gummy with more than just sleep.

“ _Where is he_?”

Someone sighs with him but the sound does not reach his ears.

It’s inside his _head_.

 

_Hello Chuck._

 

They call it schizophrenia but the headshrinkers argue from every corner. The onset was too sudden, too swift, too complete.

They call it ghost-drifting but they’ve never seen it between the living and the dead.

They call in Stacker Pentecost who drove his jaeger alone for three hours while his copilot hung limp in her harness, ravaged by the radiation from the damaged Mark I. Yes, he dreams about her sometimes. No he doesn’t know what’s happening. Yes, he saw her in the drift. No, he’s never heard of anything like this.

They can’t find Raleigh Becket.

The anger-resentment-grief he feels isn’t his.

 

Something in his head tells him to touch and he obeys. It is as though that something, _someone_ , lifts his hands and guides it like a marionette’s, his belly hollowed out when he stretches before the mirror, his skin rippling with scars.

Circuit lines crown his body like tribal tattoos. Chuck lets out a faint moan when his thumb catches on a raised line, grinding it against his hip. A cool hand cups his balls and he jerks, legs spreading in anticipation, tight pucker clenching when there is nothing there. Impatient, he brushes the ghostly hand away and grabs himself, stars spangling his eyes when he grinds his heel against his cock.

Chuck turns his head and sees himself in the mirror. Nothing has changed. He is alone in the room, toes curling against the cold tiles. But there is something friendly about the blue in his right eye, a color that hadn’t been there before the drift. The color that’s made fool of every boy in the nation.

The doctors call it heterochromia.

The doctors don’t know anything.

 

The culprits have been arrested. Post-kaiju world is not a forgiving place.

Chuck sees them one last time before they’re shipped off to a wall they will spend the rest of their lives. He sneers and takes private satisfaction in Micah’s sockless feet and Zeroni’s bruised eyes. But he cannot smile. His cheeks are numb and he feels paralyzed. He wants to speak, he can’t and the words get stuck on his tongue like chunks of meat.

The salt in the wound keeps for another time. And he realizes with growing dread that there might be something wrong with him.

 

He ignores it, of course he does. There is nothing wrong with him. The phantom fingers cupping his cheeks are an illusion, the slight nudge on the back of his knees an illicit fantasy. He sometimes dreams about one of the prettier nurses take advantage, the cut of her uniform climbing higher and higher until they barely cover anything at all.

It’s not his hand that squeezes her norks. He’s not the one who rolls a pert nipple in his mouth, fucks her thighs because he can’t get a good angle. When he sees the pictures of his brain, he only reads blots of red, yellow and green scattered all over the map. His ears don’t register a word the doctor says even though his head nods like he understands.

It talks to him sometimes, the voice, though he doesn’t recognize it. He won’t recognize it, not until the doctors tell him that he is crazy too. He’s fine. Why doesn’t anyone believe him?

“Chuck” His dad sits him down, hands twitching as though he might like to hug him and can’t figure out how. “You haven’t said a anything in a week.”

 

He talks with an American accent now. Sometimes. The nurses think that he’s trying to be funny. His counselor frowns and tells him that this is serious. But he is serious; it’s just the person inside his head trying to speak out.

In the hospital, he is bored. He watches TV and sees how jaegers are falling one by one. A Horizon Brave is destroyed, her pilots crushed inside her malfunctioning conn-pod. Cherno Alpha takes serious damage to her arms. Lucky Seven grinds to a halt in the Philippine Sea.

He doesn’t realize that he has broken the remote until it comes off in pieces in his hand, orderlies prying open his fingers one by one until they have to break his ring finger just to pick out a splintered edge. People don’t leave him alone after that.

 

_Who are you?_

_My name is Yancy Becket. I’m Gipsy’s pilot._

 

He familiarizes himself with the stranger inside his head. Tests him, sees if he’s like a scab he can peel off with minimum fuss. Chuck doesn’t like the idea of sharing his headspace. Even less when he discovers that it’s Yancy Becket who is laying his soul bare. The man used to be his hero before he died. His body was never found and in its place, the surviving brother buried a letter and a stack of memories.

Yancy doesn’t believe him until they’re at the cemetery, mud caking their heels as they trace the name laid in marble.  

 

_No_

_NO_

_NO_

 

They’ve been reassigned. Turns out they’re drift-compatible and there’s a very special lady in the works just for them.

It doesn’t matter if one’s fresh from a failed handshake and the other’s gone round the twist. The brass up top doesn’t want delays. Herc fights for six days and five nights before capitulating. The world needs saving. The kaiju will not wait.

They make it work somehow. He and his old man were never really close. The drift isn’t some magical experience everyone makes it out to be. It’s like sex, it can only go downhill. The only reason, the only reason, he and Herc stays is because they fight well together and fighting well together means that they know each other enough to hit where it hurts.

They’re good at that. That’s the only thing they’re good at.

His dad treats him like damaged goods. The old man ignores Yancy, the part of him that’s been regrown good and gold in spite of himself and he clings to it viciously as therapists upon therapists try to dig it out of him.

_He means well._

_He loves you._

Nobody likes an underachiever.

 

Chuck steps out of the showers dripping water all over the floor. He catches sight of himself in the mirror and leans close, reaching out to clear off the glass. It’s almost like having another person beside him as his reflection mimics his movements, the hair a shade too red and the eyes more green than blue.

He shivers when his ear prickles as though someone’s nibbling on it. His towel falls to his feet as he braces himself against the sink, ankles falling apart as his knees pimple with gooseflesh, knocking against the counter.

There is very little Yancy can do physically that he cannot. But he shares dirty stories as he traps his cock in his fist. He tells him of men and women who wouldn’t have looked at him twice before he was a ranger and Chuck scoffs because the cunts never knew what they were missing out on and that’s fine with him, he’s got Yancy all to himself and it doesn’t matter if they can never touch, they can never kiss or do whatever it is that couples do.

His shrink tells him that he’s got a narcissistic personality disorder and a desperate need for approval. Chuck flips her off. It’s not anything he doesn’t already know.

Yancy breaks off with a sigh when he blows his wad against the mirror.

 _You’re beautiful._ He says. _Jesus Christ kid, why do you stay with me?_

 

_Maybe I like you._

_Just a bit._

 

He snaps when he sees Raleigh.

 _The fucker’s got no right!_ He rages as he paces his room.

Max whines and cowers in his bed.

He tries to calm down, fails and locks himself in the bathroom.

_He ran. He should have stayed gone._

_Don’t say that._

Chuck bites his lips until it bleeds red and bursts all over his tongue, staining the roof of his mouth.

_He doesn’t deserve you._

 

_I wish we could have met a long time ago._

He sees Gipsy riding the waves and is sorry he can’t be there with her. Chuck doesn’t know if it’s him or Yancy who’s more excited. Through the drift, he can feel his old man’s pain but also grudging acceptance, Yancy’s infectious laughter and his fifteen-year-old self who thought that the Beckets were the greatest and wanted to grow up to be just like them.

_You are like us ace, you’re better._

 

_You’re real, you’re real, you’re real, you were always real enough for me._

Pentecost starts as though waking from a dream. Chuck gives him a hard stare and if he squints, he can almost see the faint outline of Yancy Becket hovering around his shoulders in a shared vision.

In the drift, there are no secrets.

In the drift, their loved ones stay with them.

“It’s been a pleasure.”

They can always find each other in the drift.


End file.
